Transgender

Forum












From our fabulous News Hawks!

Have you seen a TG-related news story online or in your local paper? Send it in to TGF and become a News Hawk! Don't assume we know everything that's out there, because you are our eyes and ears. To file a story, send it in to Cindy.

Recall Set For
German TS Mayor

Contributed by Rachelle Austin
via Associated Press
September 10, 1998

The village council of Quellendorf, Germany on September 10 voted 6 - 2 to approve a referendum to recall their mayor because of his planned sex reassignment.

Mayor Norbert Michael Lindner was elected in 1996 to a seven-year term, but recently announced that he would begin dressing as a woman and would later undergo the surgery. Although his wife and four children have been publicly supportive of him, the council received a recall petition signed by 175 of the village's 1,048 residents. Lindner was not allowed to speak at the meeting, where one local said, "We voted for a man, not a woman. He should have told us beforehand." The referendum will be held November 29 in the village, which is in the state of Saxony-Anhalt about 20 miles from Leipzig. as a civilian.

First Japanese
SRS Delayed

Contributed by Elizabeth Parker and Rachelle Austin
via Kyodo News
September 7, 1998

URAWA, Japan, -- Saitama Medical College decided Monday to postpone Japan's first sex-change operation for some time following news reports about the facility's unauthorized womb-ovary removal in 1993, college officials said.

The college, located north of Tokyo, had planned to conduct surgery Friday as the first stage of a sex-change operation that would take about six months to complete. News reports said Sunday the college in October 1993 removed the womb and ovaries from a woman in her 30s who wanted a sex change, without approval from the facility's ethics committee. The officials said an in-house check has found the 1993 operation was not sex-change surgery, but was to treat endometriosis.

But the planned operation has to be postponed because the school has to take some time to explain the outcome to its ethics committee and faculties, the officials said. In May, the college's ethics committee gave approval for a 30-year-old woman with transsexualism, gender-identity disorder, in northeastern Japan, to undergo a sex change on condition complete mental support measures be provided afterward. The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology said last year that sex-change operations should be permitted under certain conditions, including that the patient undergo psychoanalysis and hormone therapy following the procedure.

Some 2,200 to 7,000 people in Japan want to live as a member of the opposite sex, according to one estimate.

Macho Culture
Hurting UK Boys

Contributed by Bobby G
via Reuters
September 9, 1998

CARDIFF - Boys will be boys but it could be ruining their education and their career chances, a British researcher said on Wednesday.

Dr Ann Phoenix, of Birkbeck College in London, told the annual science festival in Cardiff there is mounting concern about boys underperforming girls in school and much of it could be to do with their need to appear macho or masculine.

``There is a growing panic about the widening gap in attainment between boys and girls at school,'' Phoenix told a news conference.

Last year more women than men went to university in Britain for the first time ever, she said. And that trend holds good right through the educational structure.

Last week, the Times newspaper said annual examination league tables for the last academic year showed in every set of tests and examinations from the age of seven until 16, girls led the way. And for ``A level'' examinations, taken at the age of 18, girls' schools now take most of the leading places.

``You can't be masculine and be seen to work hard at school,'' said Phoenix, who studied 190 schoolboys aged between 11 and 14.

Girls' ways of expressing femininity, on the other hand, seem more compatible with good educational performance, she said.

More than 20 years ago, scientific study identified ``lad culture.'' The difference is that then, boys could loaf around at school and still walk into a job of some description.

``Now they are much less likely to walk into jobs that will keep them at all well,'' Phoenix said.

Twenty years ago, educationalists fretted about how to improve girls' performance in subjects such as mathematics or physics. In some cases girls were put into separate classes and lessons were tailored towards them. Now, Phoenix said, a similar approach may be needed for boys.

``We need to think about ways through for young men,'' she said.

Men In Drag
Rob Gulf Shop

Contributed by and Elizabeth Parker
via Reuters
September 9, 1998

DUBAI - Three men donned traditional "abayas" and veils worn by Arab women and robbed a foreign exchange bureau in the tiny Gulf Arab emirate of Ajman, local newspapers reported Wednesday. Disguised in the long-sleeved black cloak and veil, marks of national identity, the robbers escaped with the day's receipts from the Ajman branch of the UAE Exchange Center after threatening the staff at gun point. "The robbers, dressed as women in abaya and veil covering their faces ... pointed guns at the staff before decamping with the day's collection in a rented car," The Gulf Today newspaper reported. Police in Ajman, the smallest of the seven emirates that make up oil-rich United Arab Emirates, were investigating the robbery. A witness said the men, who were described as "very fat and strong," had taken advantage of the fact that the currency center was about to close for lunch.

TGF's Home Page